When Drupal 8.0 was released two and a half years ago, with a built-in REST API, it signaled the start of Drupal's evolution to an API-first platform. Since then, each of the five new releases of Drupal 8 introduced significant web service API improvements. Drupal 8.6, shipping in September, will also have a new bunch of API improvements.

Atop the Castle of Saint Barbara in Alicante, time sometimes seems to slow down, and words that once held grand meaning seem inadequate. I had a similar feeling both during and on the heels of DrupalCamp Spain, organized by the Spanish Drupal Association and held this year at Las Cigarreras cultural center in a seaside city that is one of the crown jewels of not only the Valencian Community but also of Spain.

As we saw in the previous post, core REST only allows for individual entities to be retrieved, and Views REST exports only permit the issuance of GET requests rather than unsafe methods as well. But application developers often need greater flexibility and control, such as the ability to fetch collections, sort and paginate them, and access related entities that are referenced.

In this column, we'll inspect JSON API, part of the surrounding contributed web services ecosystem that Drupal 8 relies on to provide even more extensive features relevant to application developers that include relationships and complex operations such as sorting and pagination.

When Phillies hats begin to dot the landscape and one of the most beautiful train stations in the country materializes around you, you know you're in Philadelphia, a city I can never seem to stop loving. After a brief hiatus, Drupaldelphia was in full swing this year, attracting developers, creatives, and businesspeople from all over Pennsylvania and surrounding states to a conference that is always full of pleasant surprises.

As we saw in a previous installment of Experience Express, because Drupal has a HAL-compliant REST API available out of the box with minimal configuration, you can easily provision an API that can immediately be employed to consume content entities and manipulate them from other applications. Now that we have successfully exposed content entities as REST resources, used Entity Access to govern permissions, and customized the formats and authentication mechanisms in use by the core REST API, it is now time to move into actually retrieving and manipulating that data.

As the weather heated up last week in Nashville and the city's eponymous hot chicken incinerated tongues left and right, something else was burning in the spotlight at DrupalCon Nashville: decoupled Drupal.